When Was The Referent "Negro" Replaced By The Referents "Black" And "African American"?

 

Edited by Azizi Powell

This pancocojams post presents two online responses to the question "When Was The Referent "Negro" Replaced By The Referents "Black" And "African American"?

The content of this post is presented for historical, cultural, and educational purposes.

All copyrights remain with their owners.

Thanks to all those who are quoted in this post.

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REPRINT OF PORTION OF WIKIPEDIA'S PAGE ON "NEGRO"  (retrieved January 22, 2022 at 10:35 AM EDT)
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negro#United_States
"In the English language, negro is a term historically used to denote persons considered to be of Black African heritage. The word "negro" means "black" in both Spanish and in Portuguese, where English took it from.^[1] The term can be construed as offensive, inoffensive, or completely neutral, largely depending on the region or country where it is used. It has various equivalents in other languages of Europe.

[...]

United States

Prevalence of "negro" as a demonym has varied in American English. All-Negro Comics was a 1947 comic anthology written by African-American writers and featuring black characters.

Negro superseded colored as the most polite word for African Americans at a time when black was considered more offensive.^{[7][better source needed][failed verification]} In 17th-century Colonial America, the term "Negro" had been also, according to one historian, used to describe Native Americans.^[8] John Belton O'Neall's The Negro Law Of South Carolina (1848) stipulated that "the term negro is confined to slave Africans, (the ancient Berbers) and their descendants. It does not embrace the free inhabitants of Africa, such as the Egyptians, Moors, or the negro Asiatics, such as the Lascars."^[9] The American Negro Academy was founded in 1897, to support liberal arts education. Marcus Garvey used the word in the names of black nationalist and pan-Africanist organizations such as the Universal Negro Improvement Association (founded 1914), the Negro World (1918), the Negro Factories Corporation (1919), and the Declaration Of The Rights Of the Negro Peoples of the World (1920). W. E. B. Du Bois and Dr. Carter G. Woodson used it in the titles of their non-fiction books, The Negro (1915) and The Mis-Education Of The Negro (1933) respectively. "Negro" was accepted as normal, both as exonym and endonym, until the late 1960s, after the later Civil Rights Movement. One well-known example is the identification by Martin Luther King, Jr. of his own race as "Negro" in his famous "I Have A Dream" speech of 1963.

However, during the 1950s and 1960s, some black American leaders, notably Malcolm X, objected to the word Negro because they associated it with the long history of slavery, segregation, and discrimination that treated African Americans as second class citisens, or worse.^[10] Malcolm X preferred Black to Negro, but also started using the term Afro-American after leaving the Nation of Islam.^[11]

Since the late 1960s, various other terms have been more widespread in popular usage. These include black, Black African, Afro- American (in use from the late 1960s to 1990) and African American.^[12] Like many other similar words, the word "black", of Anglo-Saxon/Germanic origin, has a greater impact than "Negro", of French/Latinate origin (see Linguistic purism in English). The word Negro fell out of favor by the early 1970s. However, many older African Americans initially found the term black more offensive than Negro.

The term Negro is still used in some historical contexts, such as the songs known as Negro spirituals, the Negro leagues of baseball in the early and mid-20th century, and organizations such as the United Negro College Fund.^[13][14] The academic journal published by Howard University since 1932 still bears the title Journal of Negro Education, but others have changed: e.g. the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History (founded 1915) became the Association for the Study of Afro-American Life and History in 1973, and is now the Association for the Study of African American Life and History; its publication The Journal of Negro History became The Journal of African American History in 2001. Margo Jefferson  titled her 2015 book Negroland: A Memoir to evoke growing up in the 1950s and 1960s in the African-American upper class.

African American linguist John McWhorter has bemoaned attacks on the use of "Negro" in "utterances or written reproductions of the word when referring to older texts and titles". He sites reports that performances or publishing of certain works (William L. Dawson’s “Negro Folk Symphony”, and an anthology of Norman Mailer's works) have been avoided, "out of wariness of the word 'Negro'” used in titles; and of "two cases" between 2020-2021 "of white college professors having complaints filed against them by students for using the word 'Negro' in class when quoting older texts."^[15]

The United States Census Bureau included Negro on the 2010 Census, alongside Black and African-American, because some older black Americans still self-identify with the term.^[16][17][18] The U.S. Census used the grouping "Black, African-American, or Negro". Negro was used in an effort to include older African Americans who more closely associate with the term.^[19] In 2013 the census removed the term from its forms and questionnaires.^[20] The term has also been censored by some newspaper archives.^[21]"

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COMPLETE REPRINT OF OCTOBER 2010 JIM CROW MUSEUM ARTICLE: WHEN DID THE WORD NEGRO BECOME SOCIALLY UNACCEPTABLE?

From https://www.ferris.edu/HTMLS/news/jimcrow/question/2010/october.htm
"Question

Senator Harry Reid got in trouble for referring to President Obama as a "light skinned" African American with "no Negro dialect." What's the big dea with using the work Negro? Last time I checked there was a United Negro College Fund run by blacks.
--John Babcock - Williams, Arizona

Answer

Obama and Reid

Senator Harry Reid apologized for his comment, made before the 2008 election, that Barack Obama could win in part because he was a "light skinned" African-American with "no Negro dialect." Reid, who is resisting calls for his resignation, described the gaffe as a "poor choice of words." When did the word Negro become socially unacceptable?

It started its decline in 1966 and was totally uncouth by the mid-1980s. The turning point came when Stokely Carmichael coined the phrase black power at a 1966 rally in Mississippi. Until then, Negro was how most black Americans described themselves. But in Carmichael's speeches and in his landmark 1967 book, Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America, he persuasively argued that the term implied black inferiority. Among black activists, Negro soon became shorthand for a member of the establishment. Prominent black publications like Ebony switched from Negro to black at the end of the decade, and the masses soon followed. According to a 1968 Newsweek poll, more than two-thirds of black Americans still preferred Negro, but black had become the majority preference by 1974. Both the Associated Press and the New York Times abandoned Negro in the 1970s, and by the mid-1980s, even the most hidebound institutions, like the U.S. Supreme Court, had largely stopped using Negro.

Had Sen. Reid chosen to defend his word choice, he could have cited some formidable authorities. Colored was the preferred term for black Americans until W.E.B. Du Bois, following the lead of Booker T. Washington, advocated for a switch to Negro in the 1920s. (Du Bois also used black in his writings, but it wasn't his term of choice.) Despite claims that Negro was a white-coined word intended to marginalize black people, Du Bois argued that the term was "etymologically and phonetically" preferable to colored or "various hyphenated circumlocutions." Most importantly, the new terminology -- chosen by black leaders themselves-symbolized a rising tide of black intellectual, artistic, and political assertiveness. (After achieving the shift in vocabulary, Du Bois spearheaded a letter-writing campaign to capitalize his preferred term. In 1930 -- nine years before Harry Reid was born -- the New York Times Style Book made the change.) Black supplanted Negro when the energy of this movement waned.

In 1988, after the black power movement had itself faded, many leaders decided another semantic change was required. Jesse Jackson led the push toward African-American. But, so far, the change does not seem to have the same momentum that Negro and black once did. In recent polls, most black interviewees express no preference between black and African-American, and most publications don't recommend the use of one over the other.

It can be challenging for institutions and older people, who have seen racial terms come and go during their lifetimes, to adapt. The NAACP, founded in 1909, declined to change its name during the DuBois revolution but did stop using colored in all other contexts. Negro History Week, begun in 1926, changed to Black History Month in 1976. The United Negro College Fund is now trying to emphasize its initials rather than its full name. The last time the Supreme Court used the word Negro outside quotation marks or citations to other scholarship was in 1985. The writer was Justice Thurgood Marshall, the first black Supreme Court justice, who came of age during the time of DuBois. Despite public outcry, the U.S. Census still includes the word Negro, because many older people still use it.

October 2010 response courtesy of Slate http://www.slate.com/id/2241120/

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Two New York Times Article Excerpts About The Terms "Black" & "African American" (from 1989 & from 2020)

Edited by Azizi Powell

This pancocojams post presents excerpts from a January 31, 1989 New York Times article by Isabel Wilkerson entitled  "African-American" Favored By Many Of America's Blacks" .

This pancocojams post also presents excerpts from a June 26,2020 New York Times article by John Eligon entitled "A Debate Over Identity and Race Asks, Are African-Americans ‘Black’ or ‘black’?"

The content of this post is presented for historical and socio-cultural purposes.

All copyrights remain with their owners.

Thanks to all those who are quoted in this post.
-snip-
Click https://pancocojams.blogspot.com/2020/09/how-african-american-won-what-should-we.html for the closely related pancocojams post entitled "How "African American" Won The "What Should We Be Called" Contest" (and other comments about the "African American" referent)

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ARTICLE EXCERPT #1 .
From https://www.nytimes.com/1989/01/31/us/african-american-favored-by-many-of-america-s-blacks.html "African-American" Favored By Many Of America's Blacks"
By Isabel Wilkerson, January 31, 1989
"A movement led by the Rev. Jesse Jackson to call blacks African-Americans has met with both rousing approval and deep-seated skepticism in a debate that is coming to symbolize the role and history of blacks in this country.

The term, used for years in intellectual circles, is gaining currency among many other blacks, who say its use is a sign that they are accepting their difficult past and resolving a long ambivalence toward Africa.

The term has already shown up in the newest grade-school textbooks, been adopted by several black-run radio stations and newspapers around the country and appeared in the titles of popular books and in the conversations of many blacks as they warm to the idea and speak of visiting Africa one day.

[...]

Few people who favor the new term expect to see it replace ''black'' entirely, although they would like it to be the principal reference eventually. For now, there does not seem to be the distaste toward ''black'' that many felt toward ''Negro'' or ''colored'' two decades ago. Instead, there is a feeling that ''African-American'' can sometimes convey a significance that ''black'' cannot.

[...]

The question of a name has caused pain and controversy since the first Africans were captured and shipped to the Americas in the 17th century. The slaves called themselves Africans at first, but slave masters gave them English names and called them Negroes, the Portuguese word for black, historians say. That term was resented by some blacks who said it was degrading when whites mispronounced it, accidentally or intentionally.

The term African-American has had several incarnations in previous years, with ''Afro-American'' having spurts of popularity since the late 19th century and particularly in the 1960's. But supporters of the current movement find fault with that usage. ''We came from Africa,'' said Dr. Olive Taylor, a professor of history at Howard University. ''We didn't come from 'Afro.' ''

Arthur Ashe decided to use the term in his new book, ''A Hard Road to Glory: A History of the African-American Athlete,'' published late last year by Amistad-Warner. ''It was given a great deal of thought; it was definitely not going to be 'black,' '' the tennis player said. '' 'African-American' is much more appropriate and correct than 'Afro-American' or 'black' or any other alternative. And I didn't want to leave the wrong impression with something so permanent as a book.''

[...]

Now a term that was once considered militant is going mainstream. '' 'African-American' reflects a post-modern black consciousness,'' said Dr. Roderick Watts, an assistant professor of psychology at Yale University, who last year founded a community group with the name the Association of Agencies Serving African-Americans. ''It has a self-affirming quality that seems to fit right now.''
-snip-
Notice that the term "African American" is hyphenated ("African-American"). However, within a short amount of time, people in the United States stopped adding the hyphen, as was and is the case with other double words that are initially spelled with a hyphen (like "hip hop" instead of "hip-hop".)

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ARTICLE EXCERPT #2 
From https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/26/us/black-african-american-style-debate.html

By John Eligon, June 26, 2020

A Debate Over Identity and Race Asks, Are African-Americans ‘Black’ or ‘black’?

The push to capitalize black to refer to African-Americans is far more than a typographical change.

"It’s the difference between black and Black. A longtime push by African-American scholars and writers to capitalize the word black in the context of race has gained widespread acceptance in recent weeks and unleashed a deep debate over identity, race and power.

Hundreds of news organizations over the past month have changed their style to Black in reference to the race of people, including The Associated Press, long considered an influential arbiter of journalism style. Far more than a typographical change, the move is part of a generations-old struggle over how best to refer to those who trace their ancestry to Africa.

The capitalization of black, which has been pushed for years, strikes at deeper questions over the treatment of people of African descent, who were stripped of their identities and enslaved in centuries past, and whose struggles to become fully accepted as part of the American experience continue to this day.

“Blackness fundamentally shapes any core part of any black person’s life in the U.S. context, and really around the world,” said Brittney Cooper, an associate professor at Rutgers University whose latest book, “Eloquent Rage,” explores black feminism. “In the choice to capitalize, we are paying homage to a history with a very particular kind of political engagement.”

The move toward Black is not embraced by all African-Americans, and two of the country’s major news outlets, The New York Times and The Washington Post, are still wrestling over whether to make the change.

“Black is a color,” said the Rev. Jesse L. Jackson, the longtime civil rights leader who popularized the term “African-American” in an effort to highlight the cultural heritage of those with ancestral ties to Africa. “We built the country through the African slave trade. African-American acknowledges that. Any term that emphasizes the color and not the heritage separates us from our heritage.”

There are also concerns that turning black into a proper noun lumps people of the African diaspora into a monolithic group and erases the diversity of their experiences. Some have said it bestows credibility upon a social construct created to oppress black people. Perhaps the most notable concern is what to do about white and brown as racial identifiers.

So far, most news organizations have declined to capitalize white, generally arguing that it is an identifier of skin color, not shared experience, and that white supremacist groups have adopted that convention.

But some scholars say that to write “Black” but not “White” is to give white people a pass on seeing themselves as a race and recognizing all the privileges they get from it.

“Whiteness is not incidental,” the sociologist Eve Ewing wrote on Twitter in arguing to capitalize white as well. She added: “Whiteness is a thing. Whiteness is endowed with social meaning that allows people to move through the world in a way that people who are not white are not able to do.”

At a recent online meeting of Race/Related, a cross-desk team devoted to race coverage at The Times, a discussion of whether to capitalize black or not made clear that there is not universal agreement, even among African-Americans on the staff.

“It has been the subject of a lively and surprising debate,” said Dean Baquet, the Times’s executive editor, who has indicated that he will announce a decision on the issue soon.

The debate over racial vocabulary is unfolding amid growing recognition across society of the need to tackle racism after several high-profile police killings of black people incited mass protests nationwide.

The acceptable terms in America for identifying black people have evolved over generations, from colored to Negro to black and African-American. Also commonly used is “people of color,” an umbrella term used to include many ethnic minorities.

In the aftermath of the George Floyd killing, which has unleashed a national conversation on questions of race and racism, many say the country is long overdue to standardize the use of the uppercase B in black, which has been commonly used at black media outlets for a long time.

[…]

The debate among black people in America over how they should be described has often centered on identity as a political statement.

In her 1904 essay “Do We Need Another Name?” Fannie Barrier Williams, an educator and activist, described a lively discussion unfolding at the time among African-American scholars over whether to shed the label Negro in favor of terms like colored or Afro-American. Colored, she wrote, was a “name that is suggestive of progress toward respectful recognition.”

At the heart of the discussion, she wrote, was whether African-Americans needed a new label divorced from Negro and its connections to slavery, something of a fresh start that indicated their new place in society as free people.

Some, like W.E.B. Du Bois, favored keeping the term Negro and transforming it into something positive — an affirmation of their perseverance as a people and their freedom.

“There are so many Negroes who are not Negroes, so many colored people who are not colored, and so many Afro-Americans who are not Africans that it is simply impossible even to coin a term that will precisely designate and connote all the people who are now included under any one of the terms mentioned,” Barrier Williams wrote.

Negro became the predominant identifier of people of African descent for much of the first half of the 20th century, and even then descendants of enslaved people from Africa waged a yearslong campaign before getting most of society, including The Times, to capitalize it.

With the rise of the Black Power movement in the mid-1960s, the word black, once seen as an insult for many African-Americans, started winning embrace. In just a few years, it became the predominant descriptor of black people as Negro became obsolete. Mr. Jackson’s campaign brought African-American into popular use in the late 1980s, and it is now often used interchangeably with black.

For proponents of capitalizing black, there are grammatical reasons — it is a proper noun, referring to a specific group of people with a shared political identity, shaped by colonialism and slavery. But some see it as a moral issue as well.

It confers a sense of power and respect to black people, who have often been relegated to the lowest rungs of society through racist
systems, black scholars say.

“Race as a concept is not real in the biological sense, but it’s very real for our own identities,” said Whitney Pirtle, an assistant professor of sociology specializing in critical race theory at the University of California, Merced. “I think that capitalizing B both sort of puts respect to those identities, but also alludes to the humanities.”….

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